‘The New York Times’ offices are a surprisingly inert environment’

So said GorkanaPR in a comment on Monday 5 Dec 2011 (emphasis mine):

The end of empires

The feature length documentary, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times was aired as part of the consistently excellent Storyville series a fortnight ago, although for the purposes of the Beeb it has been renamed Deadline (it’s available on iPlayer until next weekend). It was filmed in the same fly-on-the-wall manner as The September Issue, a similarly conceived film about Vogue, but unfortunately it focuses less about the editorial direction of the publication, and more a look at the US equivalent of Media Guardian. This may in part be because The New York Times’ offices are a surprisingly inert environment (the editorial meetings are especially disappointing) and you have to constantly remind yourself that this is the pinnacle of the US media establishment and not some logistics office of a multinational on the outskirts of St Louis. By focusing on the media team it also allows the film to use a number of incidents throughout the year from WikiLeaks to the collapse of the Tribune group to analyse how the newspaper market has changed in the US. It also allows the gruff and laconic media columnist David Carr to take a starring role.